The video game industry is still very young compared to its film or music counterparts, and therefore there is much more experimentation in it. Every year there are projects whose creators are trying to introduce some new mechanics and unique concepts for constructing gameplay or plot. Of course, we can mostly see the most notable experiments now on the independent game development scene, but large studios or publishers can sometimes invest in something fundamentally new and untried. Once upon a time, David Cage was able to almost open up a new kind of storytelling with the help of his Fahrenheit And Heavy Rain. And last year Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, experimenting with sound and storytelling through a connection with the madness of the main character, it became an excellent and unique work of art that can touch those very sensitive notes of the soul that hide deep under our skin.
But sometimes you come across projects that, at the level of their idea, may seem like something curious, intriguing, even beautiful, but in the end they turn out to be a dull, clumsy and completely uninteresting piece of program code, pretentiously pretending to be an art-house work of art. This is exactly the kind of game that the recently released Quiet Man.

Genre Beat-em-up has long been in decline, it has long been replaced by something more beloved by the masses Slasher. And therefore, personally, I look forward to every project about a fight with droplets of greedy salivation. Alas, I haven’t seen anything better than the PS2 classics for a long time. Such giants of the genre as GodHand or Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, they remain for me the icons of gaming massacre. After seeing the first trailers Quiet Man, my eyes lit up – street fights with beautiful pirouettes, a mysterious plot about a deaf teenager with bangs saving a girl from either cultists or just gopniks, cinematic filming that smoothly flows into the gameplay and, although not advanced, but quite pleasant graphics. And trust in the publisher Square Enix still present in my gaming heart. What could possibly go wrong?? After playing The Quiet Man about five o’clock, I realized that the developers of this game have crooked hands and straight convolutions in their brains, because they did everything wrong!

From the very first level https://21hitcasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ you understand that the fights in the commercials looked good only because they were edited well (that’s the only thing that was done well). When you pick up a gamepad or keyboard and mouse, the first thing that causes rejection is a certain twitchiness of the animation. Fights look chaotic and awkward. Even children playing with small figures make them look more organic in battle than the characters in the game fighting Quiet Man. There are very few animations of strikes and dodges, and they all look very unsmooth, as if there were gaps in the movements. It gets to the point where, when trying to carry out a finishing move, the hero suddenly teleports to the enemy, taking the necessary pose in a split second without at least some smooth animation. There are super strikes, or rather cinematic combinations of strikes performed after accumulated energy, and these are the only techniques during which the game can look at least somewhat acceptable, because they are made in the form of small pre-scripted videos, and before they are executed, the camera briefly moves behind the shoulder of the main character.

The strikes themselves and the types of their combinations are so catastrophically small that after three or four fights the combat system becomes boring, even before it has time to become at least somewhat interesting. The battles look completely uncool, they play clumsily and awkwardly, and there is almost no challenge in them. Only a few bosses are challenging, but even that is solely due to poor game design. It can be difficult to even properly target a specific enemy, and you end up just running around the bosses like in the Bunny Hill show, waiting for them to hit the air. The situation might not have been so dire if the developers had been smart enough to give the hero the opportunity in battle to use scattered objects that came across here and there, like fire extinguishers and various sticks lying around in the middle of the garbage, of which there was a lot drawn around.

And don’t forget about the eye-catching filters that color the screen when the hero takes damage – from faded gray to unrealistically bright red. And even though the levels in the game are mainly represented by small areas of 5 by 5 meters, the camera sometimes takes very awkward angles, and you are not always allowed to rotate it yourself. To all of the above, add technical problems and a sagging framerate of up to about 15 frames per second even on the console, which, given the not the most advanced and constantly blurry picture, is unforgivable.

Well, the most “ingenious” concept, which for some reason the authors of the game adhered to – all the videos are an almost silent action. Yes, we were warned that there would be no sound of voices or even subtitles in the game during the first playthrough. Supposedly we should feel what is happening, just like the deaf protagonist. As a result, this results in a story in which you will sometimes not understand why the hero went where he did, how he knew where to look for the villain, who all these people are and what they are talking about. All voices are replaced with muted keyboard polyphony. And, of course, you must interpret the motivations of the characters for yourself. Although, it is worth noting that the plot of the game even has its own twists, albeit predictable ones. At the same time, I am sure that most gamers, even after completing the game, will not understand what the insidious plan of the main villain was (or at least who the main villain is really here and why), whether there is mysticism here or not, and why flashbacks about the murdered mother of the main character were needed (Dane was friends with his mother’s killer for several years, forgetting about it and trying to find the killer of his mother, who looks like the singer he protects?). First of all, this will be due to the fact that during 15-minute videos, in which nothing happens other than inaudible conversations of people, you will slowly fall asleep.
And in some scenes it is clear that Dane understands what is being said to him and even answers something to other characters, so why can’t I at least find out with the help of subtitles what was said to him and what he answered!? Yes, sometimes it’s just not clear what’s going on around here. After November 11, a patch will appear that will add the ability to complete the game with sound, but only after one complete playthrough without sound. Why this opportunity is not given right away and why you need to wait for a patch is a mystery shrouded in darkness.

In the end, a compelling cinematic story is not that, because it is either impossible to understand, or you will simply fall asleep during long videos in which people open their mouths, but do not seem to say anything. Combining live filming with computer graphics is generally pointless; it seems to me that here it only helped to significantly reduce the budget and increase the pretentiousness of the narrative. There is no trace of intense gameplay here. The experiment of the creators of this game definitely failed.

The Quiet Man is sold for a quarter of the price of a modern AAA project, but this does not mean that, giving away their game for less money, the developers should not have made something decent and at least not boring out of it, and that means no discounts or pity – the game deserves extremely low ratings and censure.